Call of Cthulhu

• The First Amendment (Prohibition against laws effecting Freedom of speech and the press, the seperation of Church and State, and the right to public protest).


• The Fourth Amendment (Prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure, mandatory need for warrants, conditions under which warrants can be writ).


• The Fifth Amendment (Prohibition against arrest without formal indictment, prohibition against denying a citizen due process under law).


• The Sixth Amendment [ibid] (Prohibition against unreasonable detention of a citizen without a fair and speedy trial, formal charge, access to a lawyer, or the right to face his accusers).


• The Eighth Amendment (Prohibition against excessive bail, excessive fines, or cruel and unusual punishment).


• The Ninth Amendment (Prohibition against assuming that rights not spelled out by the Constitution do not exist for individual citizens).


• The Tenth Amendment (Prohibition against assuming that rights not spelled out by the Constitution do not exist for individual states).

• 65% of Americans either don't know or don't believe that Evolution is a valid scientific theory.


• 25% believe that the Sun goes around the Earth


• 52% believe that humans once coexisted with dinosaurs


• 46% don't know how long it takes for the Earth to go around the Sun

In the Hasbiyyah area, I counted the bodies of at least six US soldiers lying on the ground.

Some of them were badly mangled with various bits blown off. Others were in better condition, as if they had taken small-arms fire.

I noticed two of the US soldiers were still clutching their guns tightly across their chests. But most of their weapons were missing.

"What are you doing?" he asked one of the fighters.

"We are preaching to them about Islam," said the fighter.

"Why? They are not Muslims?"

"No."

The young man looked with puzzlement at the other fighter and said: "But then, why don't we kill them?"

"We can't do that now. They are in a state of truce with us," the fighter said.

The fighters belonged to Tawhid and Jihad, the group that has claimed responsibility for most of the violence sweeping Iraq. Eradicating these men is one of the prime objectives of the US offensive on Falluja.

I had to go but as I was about to leave he grabbed my hand and asked me if I was an Iraqi, I told him yes, he whispered to me: “god help you Iraqis you have been humiliated but inshaallh god will help you defend your self against the occupiers”. He was so somber when he was telling me these words.

A few minute later he called me

-are you a Muslim?
-No.
-Why is that?
-Well I think that is due to some technical reasons related to the fact that my mother and father mated when they were Christians.
-But how come you are not a Muslim? you are smart (!!!!) and you handle two languages easily you should be a Muslim!
-But I always considered my self a member of the Islamic culture.
*he acted a if he didn't hear my answer*
-my friend I m ready to talk to you whenever you want.

He was so nice and in the same time wounded in his pride, he was betrayed. Allah betrayed him he told him to go, cross the border and there he will find all the infidels he wants. He could go and kill as much as he could to purify the land of the Muslims from those filthy animals. Instead he is trapped in this fuckin’ hospital, being taken care of by cute Americans.

The amir told me: "All we want is the Americans to leave, and then everything will be fine, the Kurds will stop talking about seceding from Iraq, the Shias will stop talking about settling scores with Sunnis and each province will elect a council and these councils will elect a president.

"That is the election we see democratic, not an American one."

• that Dumbya™ was above the Geneva Convention.


• that "terrorist suspects" were not entitled to protections under the Geneva Convention.


• that neither the Preznit nor his cabinet could be legally held accountable for violations of the Geneva Convention vis-a-vis "terrorist suspects".

We stop, turn off the siren, keep the blue light flashing, wait, eyes on the silhouettes of men in US marine uniforms on the corners of the buildings. Several shots come. We duck, get as low as possible and I can see tiny red lights whipping past the window, past my head. Some, it’s hard to tell, are hitting the ambulance I start singing. What else do you do when someone’s shooting at you? A tyre bursts with an enormous noise and a jerk of the vehicle.

I’m outraged. We’re trying to get to a woman who’s giving birth without any medical attention, without electricity, in a city under siege, in a clearly marked ambulance, and you’re shooting at us. How dare you?

We load the ambulance with disinfectant, needles, bandages, food and water and set off, equipped this time with loudspeakers, pull up to a street corner and get out. The hospital is to the right, quite a way off; the marines are to the left. Four of us in blue paper smocks walk out, hands up, calling out that we’re a relief team, trying to deliver supplies to the hospital.

There’s no response and we walk slowly towards the hospital. We need the ambulance with us because there’s more stuff than we can carry, so we call out that we’re going to bring an ambulance with us, that we’ll walk and the ambulance will follow. The nose of the ambulance edges out into the street, shiny and new, brought in to replace the ones destroyed by sniper fire.

Shots rip down the street, two bangs and a zipping noise uncomfortably close. The ambulance springs back into the side road like it’s on a piece of elastic and we dart into the yard of the corner house, out through the side gate so we’re back beside the vehicle.

So we can describe our calculus of pain, holding (p) as the probability that Cthulhu exists, and (1-p) that he does not exist.

If you worship him, we assign ‘X1’ as the pain if he does exist, and ‘X2’ as the pain if he does not exist. X2 is less than X1 because in both instances you go through the pain associated with worshipping Cthulhu, but in X1, you also get eaten, which is more painful.

If you worship him your expected pain (EP1) is some finite constant:

EP1 = p(X1) + (1-p)(X2)

A federal judge ruled Monday that President Bush had both overstepped his constitutional bounds and improperly brushed aside the Geneva Conventions in establishing military commissions to try detainees at the United States naval base here as war criminals.

[Snip]

The conventions oblige the United States to treat Mr. Hamdan as a prisoner of war, the judge said , unless he goes before a special tribunal described in Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention that determines he is not. A POW is entitled to a court-martial if there are accusations of war crimes but may not be tried before a military commission.

"By conferring protected legal status under the Geneva Conventions on members of Al Qaeda, the judge has put terrorism on the same legal footing as legitimate methods of waging war."

I'm so glad we got that straightened out.

• 51% is not a Mandate. Only an idiot that calls the worse job-loss record in 70 years would think that 51% = Massive Majority.


• We've only been fighting for 24 months against a fundamentalist propaganda machine that has been at work for 12 years. And we made a good show of it, too. Very nearly won.


• The mid-terms are only two years away, and we can build on our gains to sweep those elections and steal back the Congress.